Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Sometime shortly after the Mailers arrived, Shelley Winters asked for his help. She wanted desperately to get a role in an upcoming film, A Place in the Sun, based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which George Stevens was directing and producing for Paramount. According to Winters, after a dinner at a Mexican restaurant with Mailer and Burt Lancaster (with whom she was having an affair), she asked Mailer to explain the novel to her, especially the character Roberta Alden, a factory girl who is murdered by the protagonist, Clyde Griffiths (played by Montgomery Clift in the film). After Lancaster left, Winters asked him to come to her apartment. Mailer remembered that he had his “own little agenda tucked into the middle of it. Hey, I’ll be alone with this blonde actress and maybe good things will come of it,” but Winters was “totally unsexy” that night. She was very worried and looked “ready to go in for a strong case of the weeps,” he said. Winters was impressed by his blue eyes, and for several hours, she said, “the young handsome Norman Mailer talked to me about the inner workings of that girl’s mind and what Dreiser wanted the reader to feel about the whole American syndrome of success at any price. Norman knew so much about Dreiser that I got the feeling he had been his protégé.” Mailer gave her the key character trait: Alden is “a girl completely without artifice.” Winters used the line with Stevens, got the role, and did a magnificent job in it. The film won seven Academy Awards, including best director, and Clift and Winters were nominated for Oscars. She told and retold the story of how he coached her many times, always acknowledging with gratitude his role in launching her career.

  The Mailers moved to a seven-room house at 1601 Marlay Drive in the foothills just beyond Sunset Boulevard. Jean and Galy Malaquais moved into the small apartment over the garage. On August 28, Bea gave birth to a daughter, Susan. Malaquais was named godfather. Mailer told his parents that the six-pound baby “looked like a prize fighter at the end of a fight,” but the swelling quickly disappeared and now she looked “astonishingly like you, mother.” Writing to Fig a few weeks later to announce the birth, his tone was different. He said he had been “running to the hospital, dicking around, getting bawled out by my wife who acts infinitely superior to me now, and just generally suffering.” No scriptwriting jobs had turned up; negotiations with Hecht were inching; Barbary Shore needed more work; and the new father was, temporarily, a satellite. He continued reading Kapital and discussing it with Malaquais, who was still laboring on his translation of Naked.

  When he was at Harvard he had dreamed of being a screenwriter and now he had his chance. Sometime around mid-October, Cy and Mailer’s new agent, George Landy, arranged a meeting with Samuel Goldwyn at MGM. Malaquais said that the first meeting with the legendary producer was “high comedy.” Goldwyn met them in his bathrobe in a huge living room with dummy books on the walls. Malaquais gave an overview of the script they wanted to write and Goldwyn asked for a two-page outline, which they refused, knowing it could be stolen. Shortly afterward, they got a $50,000 contract—a $5,000 advance and $15,000 for each of three revisions. They were also given offices and secretaries. “The day after the contract was signed,” Malaquais said, “a notice appeared in Variety, and I became overnight a VIP of sorts, trailing in Norman’s shadow.” The working title of the script was “The Character of the Victim.”

  Inspired by Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West’s novel about a depressed advice columnist, the Mailer-Malaquais script is the story of two disc jockeys, Peter Pity and Victor Vision. By happenstance, the two receive a record from someone seeking advice. Eventually, they solicit records on the air, and their show becomes a tremendous success—anticipating the reality television shows of the 2000s. Pity, the Good Samaritan, is eventually killed by a guest on the show. They worked on the script for a month and produced ninety pages. When they showed it to Goldwyn, he had already begun conversations with Montgomery Clift and Charles Boyer about playing the lead roles. But as Malaquais recalled, “He wanted it changed so that good sentiments would be rewarded and bad sentiments would be punished.” Mailer remonstrated with Goldwyn, telling him that he was a professional writer and would not have his work tampered with by hacks. He harrumphed on for a good while until Goldwyn said, “Mailer, please stop this professional writer shit, and start writing,” a comment Mailer came to relish. Then Goldwyn offered to buy the script. They refused and retained the rights. In retrospect, Mailer said that the script “stank. It was half-art, half-commercial, the sort of thing you can delude yourself about for a long time.” After Goldwyn’s death, Mailer said that he “treated me well—if eccentrically—hurrah!—and I remain outrageously fond of his memory.” The same week in late November that the break with Goldwyn occurred, he got a letter from his father.

  Given his huge royalties and his father’s unquenchable gambling habit, Mailer had been half expecting the letter. Barney’s opening line was: “I want you to give me a loan of $3,000.00! OUCH!!” He went on to say that he knew he was putting his request “rather brusquely and this carries with it the appropriate sense of alarm. Well, there is no alarm, and if I put it this way, it’s only that I want to get around that old characteristic of mine of being timid when it comes to asking a favor of my son—or anyone else. Call it false pride—or what you will, but I always seem to go through a sense of shameful emotions when I have to ask you for a monetary favor.” He drops his indirections only once, and that is in a doubly underlined and vehement injunction not to tell Fan of this request. The reason for his loan is never mentioned. Mailer answered immediately, on Thanksgiving Day 1949:

  If I ever had any doubt as to where I got my writing ability from, I know now finally that it comes from you. Your last letter was a masterpiece in which every line and every word is perfect—I doubt whether I have ever written two pages as good as that myself.

  However, being a practitioner of the written word myself, I have come to understand a little about the emotional processes that go into writing, and so I find that I cannot accept your letter completely. For while it is a masterful document of the English colonel writing to his son about one of those bagatelles—a gambling debt—I finish it by reminding myself that you are not an English colonel but a Jewish accountant in Brooklyn, and that it is time you grew up.

  I must confess that I have little hope in this direction. If I had I’d probably spend a great deal of time upbraiding you—I would scream about the three thousand dollars, would appeal to you as a grandfather (the money represents two years of college for Susan) would complain as a son (I figured out today that when I work in Hollywood for a thousand dollars a week, it represents after paying agent’s and lawyer’s fees, income tax, and subtracting living expenses, no more than three hundred dollars each seven days are saved. Thus this sum represents ten weeks of very unpleasant work to me.) But actually, I’ve always understood you better than Mother. There’s no use upbraiding you because your eyes look away, your mind wanders, and your mouth gets sullen. One’s a fool to nag a little boy.

  Mailer tells his father he will pay the $3,000 but insists that Barney tell the bookies that this is the last time he will pay. He adds that if Barney tries to invade any of the accounts of the customers of Mailer and Troll, Barney’s new accounting firm, “I shall probably let you go to prison, but in any case I shall never speak to you again. And I shall tell Barbara everything.” He ends by noting that “my own vices are quite the equal of yours—but because the situation is intolerable, and I do not intend to be burdened with it for the rest of my life.” The letter infuriated Barney and he promptly ran up his debt to the bookie to $5,000. Dave Kessler had written Barney off after years of backstopping him and now Mailer, with his new wealth, became Barney’s guarantor. He paid his father’s debt.

  Barney was adamant about keeping Fan in the dark because he had avoided any significant gambling debts during the war years and hoped to establish that he had beaten his addiction. Fan was still vigilant, but whenever she tried to ferret out evidence of Barney playing poker or betting on
the ponies, he would parry her probes. On one occasion, Mailer, in a pseudo-British accent, imitated his father’s feigned irritation: “Oh Fan, are you going to bring that up again? What’s the use of us being together if you are always referring to that former problem?” Mailer used a similarly indignant tone when he was questioned about his infidelities by Norris, his last wife, as she recounts in her memoir, A Ticket to the Circus. His infidelities are, in fact, the vices to which he refers in his letter. They are also the reason he believed that he was exactly like his father: he was also a secret addict, not to gambling, but to women.

  A few months before his death, he told his biographer, “When in doubt about my motivation, cherchez la femme.” Barney’s double life gave Mailer a model and even sanction for his own. His infidelities were numerous, but they were not motivated solely, or even mainly, by his desire for sex, although it was always strong. His thirst for new experience was the final cause of his duplicities. If risk was involved, so much the better; it added sauce. Lust partnered with curiosity. In his mind, the veins that novelists had been mining for over a century were petering out. Sex and violence were the last lodes. This meant exploring every kind of sexual activity and every sort of violence. There were countervailing factors, of course, and his children and wives (Norris especially); his sister, Barbara; and Fan, the rock of family solidarity, would have a moderating influence on his philandering. Barney played an emblematic role, one not incongruent, as Mailer might have put it, with a comment he made toward the end of his life: “Whatever value my works have comes from my Dad going against the tide. My mother was in the center of the current.”

  Barney and Fan came to Hollywood in the late fall to see their granddaughter. Mailer squired them around and introduced them to Chaplin, which pleased Fan greatly. But their visit marked the beginning of the Hollywood experiment going sour. Barney pinched a few girls, according to Mickey Knox, including his wife, Georgette, which raised hackles. Malaquais’s self-importance and his influence on her son angered Fan. She said he was “a sponger” who was taking advantage of him. But Bea, who didn’t like Malaquais at first, finding him to be pompous, came to admire his intellectual qualities. “I even fell a little bit in love with him,” she remembered. At the same time, she seemed to be falling out of love with her husband. Fan believed Bea “was the unhappiest woman in the world” because of the adulation her husband received.

  At Christmas, the Mailers threw a party and invited a large crowd. “It was,” Mailer said, “the nearest I ever came to having a Hollywood celebrity party.” He sent telegrams to anyone he thought might want to meet the author of Naked and the Dead. Humphrey Bogart was there, as were Chaplin, Goldwyn, Clift, Ginger Rogers, Cecil B. DeMille, Elizabeth Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Fredric March, John Huston, Jean and Galy, Mickey Knox, John Ford, Victor McLaglen, Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair, and Winters, who came with Marlon Brando. Before the night was over Malaquais had gotten into an argument with Chaplin about the United States and Russia. Chaplin’s position was that each country should have its own sphere of influence, which Malaquais found laughable. “Look, Mr. Chaplin,” Malaquais said, “as far as being an actor, you are [a] genius, but when it comes to politics, you are a nincompoop.” Malaquais’ candor seems to have endeared him to Chaplin, who later invited him to dinner. Accounts of the party do not entirely agree, but one incident, reported by Winters, points to the ambiguous position that Mailer now occupied in Hollywood. When Brando started to leave, Mailer came up to him and encouraged him to stay. Brando responded, “Norman, what the fuck are you doing here? You’re not a screenwriter. Why aren’t you on a farm in Vermont writing your next novel? What kind of shit is this?” But he did not immediately take Brando’s advice. He still wanted to see Naked made into a film. Shortly after the party, the Mailers rented a fourteen-room house at 7475 Hillside Drive, in the Hollywood Hills, where the parties continued.

  “Norman had an enormous reputation in that town,” Knox said, “as the first young writer to come out of the war.” In poker terms, his reputation was his stack, and he was prepared to bet it. After Mailer returned Goldwyn’s advance, he planned to sell the screenplay elsewhere. But word got around that things had soured with Goldwyn, and its appeal diminished. When the deal with Lancaster and Hecht disintegrated, he tried to sell Naked to the big studios or independent producers, but had no success. He and Malaquais looked for more screenwriting work and almost landed a job at Twentieth Century-Fox, but that also fell through. There were daily meetings and lunches with actors, executives, and producers, all to no avail. When Hellman told him in late 1949 that she was abandoning her effort to turn Naked and the Dead into a Broadway play, it was just one more disappointment. Mailer was learning that reputation was a bubble.

  He knew he had to finish Barbary Shore (the title refers to the oncoming barbarism of totalitarianism) and got back to work on it in mid-March. Malaquais had finished translating Naked by then and in early April he and Galy left town, hastened perhaps by the sour mood in the house. The Mailers knew their time in Lotus Land was coming to an end. At the end of March, he told his parents that “the whole Hollywood venture has turned out to be a fairly sad mistake.” To Fig, he was more direct: “Hollywood stinks,” he said, and then opened up about his deteriorating relationship with Bea. She has become “the Mother,” he said. “Never sleeps at night, pushes me around. I just carry a fucking guilt complex all the time.” The baby, however, gave him cheer. Susan is cute, he said, and laughs a lot. They left California in early May, driving to Chicago, where Mailer was introduced to Nelson Algren, who took him to see a police lineup. He wrote to Barbara that Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm “is the best novel written in America” since Naked, and he and Algren saw each other more than once when Mailer visited Chicago. After a brief stay in Brooklyn, the Mailers went to Provincetown from June 1 through the end of September.

  OVER THE NEXT six decades, he would summer on Cape Cod all but a handful of years. The house where he stayed in 1950, and again in 1960, the Joseph Hawthorne house on Miller Hill Road, stands at one of the highest points in Provincetown. He described it in “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out,” the prologue to a novel about a hipster named Marion Faye that he never finished.

  The house Marion purchased was on a sand dune behind the last hill overlooking the town, and it was isolated, especially in fall and winter, reached by a sandy road that dipped down one dune and up another to give a view of rolling furze, rain water ponds, and the ocean and beach of the back shore. In bad weather the wind was a phenomenon, a New England wind of the lost narrow faiths that slashed through open doors, tempted shutters loose from their catch and banged them through the night, vibrated every small pane in every Cape Cod window and came soughing out of the sky with the cries of storm water in its vaults—on such nights the hundred years of the house were alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suffered: it was the kind of house in which the dogs barked insanely in bad weather, and the nurse could not rest, and the baby awoke in hysterical terror at one in the morning while the mother would feel dread at the hundred rages of her husband beside her in marriage sleep, and the house shifted and swayed to the wind like a ship in the north Atlantic seas, yes it seemed to contain every emotion that had died a frustrated death in its rooms and walls through a hundred New England winters.

  The passage reflects the pain and regret Mailer remembered from those months in Provincetown in 1950. When he went into the Old Colony Bar, he was surrounded by admirers, young women among them, who were as interested in one-night stands as was the handsome young author with a wife and a baby waiting for him in the house on the hill. Bea, having abandoned novel writing, was working seriously on piano playing, and was also translating a long political document, “Socialism and Barbary,” written by Malaquais and some Trotskyite associates.

  He pushed ahead on the novel, working in the mornings and producing three pages of typescript a day. When Fan and Barney came for a visit in July, they
“almost drove me nuts,” he wrote to Adeline in Chicago, “and I acted like a complete bastard, almost incapable of being civil to either of them.” In a letter to his sister he castigates her for spending time reading Henry Miller, who, he said, “fulfills none of the qualifications of the serious writer.” This is precisely what Mailer was straining to be in the summer of 1950: a class-conscious, committed-to-social-change writer. As he told Harvey Breit in 1951, “If a writer really wants to be serious he has to become intellectual, and yet nothing is harder.” Henry Miller was a serious writer and social critic with a prose style that Mailer would come to envy, but Miller loathed politics. When Mailer rediscovered him in the 1970s, he would elevate him to the high plateau of literary eminence occupied by his literary heroes: Farrell, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Melville. But in 1950 he saw Miller’s Rabelaisian adventures as frivolous.

  He finished the second draft of Barbary Shore on August 15, and in October they moved to Putney, Vermont, not far from where they had lived in 1949. It was a last attempt to salvage the marriage. For $9,000, they bought a 150-year-old farmhouse with a dozen rooms and a big barn. But it put the left-wing couple into a guilty mood: “To own something! Oh, Christ. We’ll probably have to be psychoanalyzed.” (Undergoing psychoanalysis was something that Mailer began to consider during this period.) His absorption in the failure of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath is reflected in the novel’s lengthy debates between McLeod, an ex-Soviet agent now to the left of Trotsky, and a sadistic FBI agent, Leroy Hollingsworth, in a Brooklyn boardinghouse. Hollingsworth’s protracted effort to gain McLeod’s confession finally succeeds. But Mailer felt, as he said later, as if he was “not writing the book myself,” but that it was being written by his unconscious, which “was much more interested in other matters: murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis, all the themes I discuss in Advertisements [for Myself]. Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling, the tension to get a bridge across resulted in the peculiar feverish hothouse atmosphere of the book.”